Would any sane PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?…

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned — Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States — who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

We learned last year that many of the effects of climate change are irreversible. Sea levels have been rising at a greater rate year after year, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates they could rise by another meter or more by the end of this century.

As National Geographic showed us in 2013, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world’s major cities.
Business Insiderwhat Earth would look like if all the ice melted
Produced by Alex Kuzoian

While indigenous cultures differ widely from one another, what they collectively present is an alternative relationship—to the earth, to its resources, and to each other—a relationship based not on domination but on reciprocity. ~ Kristin Moe, YES! Magazine

People get it. Organic methods produce better food and chemical herbicides are toxic to the plaent. If they also understood there is no food shortage and that the ecological destruction by industrial agriculture is NOT NECESSARY to prevent famine, they would support dismantling this suicidal system.

But what industry understands, and the food movement does not, is that what prevents total rejection of bland, industrialised, pesticide-laden, GMO food is the standard acceptance, especially in Western countries, of the overarching agribusiness argument that such food is necessary. It is necessary to feed the world.

So, if the food movement could show that famine is an empty threat then it would also have shown, by clear implication, that the chemical health risks and the ecological devastation that these technologies represent are what is unnecessary. The movement would have shown that pesticides and GMOs exist solely to extract profit from the food chain. They have no other purpose. Therefore, every project of the food movement should aim to spread the truth of oversupply, until mention of the Golden Fact invites ridicule and embarrassment in the population, rather than fear. ~ Jonathan Latham, PhD

When you are McDonalds you like this red box with a bouquet of really long chips [french fries]. Looks really good. So they insist that all their potatoes be Russet-Burbanks and they further insist that they have no blemishes at all. There is a very common defect of Russet-Burbank potatoes called net necrosis. You’ve seen them with those little brown lines or spots that come through them. Well, McDonalds won’t buy them if your potatoes have that. The only way to eliminate that is to eliminate an aphid and the only way to do that is with a pesticide called Monitor that is so toxic that the famers that grow these potatoes in Idaho won’t venture outside to their fields for 5 days after they spray. Then when they harvest these potatoes they have to put them in these atmospheric controlled sheds the size of a football stadium because they are not edible for 6 weeks. They have to off-gas all the chemicals in them. So you see, the desire for a certain kind of chip leads to a certain kind of agriculture.